Microsoft Teams

You can create an Office 365 retention policy to process Teams channel conversations and personal chats, but how do you prove that the policy is working? As it turns out, the only way is by checking the mailboxes where Teams stores compliance items and the statistics generated by the Exchange Online Managed Folder Assistant.

Teams and Skype for Business Online both capture IM conversation records that can be found by Office 365 eDiscovery (content) searches. All of which is good, but if you ever get around to performing eDiscovery and need this information, you'll find that Skype for Business Online conversation transcripts are easier to use than the individual copies of conversation contributions captured by Teams.

The licensing model for Teams is now per-user instead of tenant-wide. That's fine if you leave everyone enabled for Teams, but removing licenses one at a time for a set of users through the Office 365 Admin Center is a tiresome and boring operation. PowerShell can help ease the pain, and here's a script to do the job.

Office 365 Groups and Teams can hold tons of secrets that we don't want to share outside our organization. To keep sensitive information secure, you can block guest users from groups by setting a directory policy on your most important and confidential groups.

Most of the time, the Teams clients run along without a problem. But like all software, they have their moments. Here's how to attack the problem if your Teams clients start to misbehave, including how to give the Microsoft developers some feedback.

Microsoft Teams now supports inline translation for messages and personal chats. The translation is done by Microsoft Translator for over 60 languages, and it works well. A couple of small glitches might occur in translation, but Microsoft Translator is probably better at generating foreign language text than you are...

A free version of Teams is now available and it's pretty good. Up to 300 users, free storage, and lots of functionality - and a phantom Office 365 tenant (or so it seems). The nice people at Slack might not like what they see, but there's fierce competition to secure the hearts and minds of those who choose to collaborate using a free platform.

Microsoft Teams has introduced a way for Office 365 tenants to archive teams. Basically you set the team to be read-only, a status that affects conversations and files. However, it doesn't stop team members having read-write access to other group resources, like Planner or Power BI.

Office 365 Groups and Teams support guest users, who enjoy full access to the SharePoint document libraries. You might not want this, because not every document in those libraries are suitable for sharing with guests. The question is how to collaborate with guests while maintaining some control over information. Rights management seems like a good way to accomplish the task.

The Office 365 Audit Log holds lots of interesting information about how people share information. In this article, we explore how to use the audit log records to discover the document sharing habits of users, including the documents shared with guest users and people outside the tenant.